Paintings

A body bends over a diagram; an angel reaches down to hold a collapsing Christ; a winged tormentor spreads himself across the sunset. William Blake makes thought visible through the human figure. The movement of a shoulder, the angle of a knee or the reach of an arm can organise an entire picture. Yet these images inhabit very different objects: a colour print finished with watercolour, a small tempera on iron, a painting on mahogany. Looking closely begins with recognising those differences. ^{[1] [2] [3]}

Blake’s paintings are often encountered alongside his illustrated poems and prints, and that is a rewarding way to see them. Drawing, printing and painting repeatedly meet in his work. A printed surface might be transformed with transparent washes and emphatic pen lines; a biblical composition might pass through watercolour and engraving before becoming a tempera panel. The distinctions between these objects matter, but they do not create a ladder with oil painting at the top. Blake himself argued that drawing and painting shared the same artistic foundation. His pictures invite us to follow the invention across materials. ^{[3] [4]}

What counts as a Blake painting?

The familiar word painting covers only part of the material variety in Blake’s art. Tate describes The Agony in the Garden as tempera on iron. Its Satan Smiting Job with Sore Boils is pen and tempera on mahogany. The River of Life is pen and watercolour on paper. Newton is a colour print finished in ink and watercolour. These descriptions tell us where the image lives and how it was made; each offers a different starting point for looking. ^{[1] [2] [3] [5]}

A watercolour may combine a lightly sketched beginning, firm ink contours and areas of colour with different degrees of transparency. A tempera can have a prepared ground beneath its paint and a solid panel, canvas or metal support. A colour print begins with colour transferred from a printing surface, then may receive considerable work by hand. In Blake’s large colour prints, the resulting image can be so painterly that the distinction between a printed picture and a painting becomes an active question. Joseph Viscomi uses the term “printed paintings” to capture this relationship. ^{[16] [17]}

Blake’s own vocabulary requires care. He used fresco for works that were portable and painted in water-based colours, including pictures on canvas and some of his large colour prints. In the advertisement for his 1809 exhibition he imagined a wall-like painting that could be moved as conveniently as an easel picture. The term expressed an ambition to recover what he believed was an ancient, durable art. It does not mean that the object before us must have been painted into the wet plaster of a building. The support and technical description supplied for the particular work remain essential. ^{[4] [17]}

This breadth also explains why a collection of Blake’s best-known pictures can look more materially uniform in reproductions than it really is. A screen makes a sheet of paper and a wooden panel occupy the same bright rectangle. It can make a small, intimate object appear monumental, or conceal the raised and broken texture of printed paint. Reading the medium alongside the image restores some of that lost distinction. With Blake, the medium is part of the encounter, not a minor detail beneath the title. ^{[1] [2] [3] [17]}

The line gives colour its shape

Blake’s defence of outline is one of the most useful introductions to his painting. In the Descriptive Catalogue of 1809, he linked an artist’s power of invention to a definite boundary. His phrase “the bounding line” connects a formal decision with the recognition of individual things: the difference between one tree and another, one animal and another, one face and another. A line gives a form its particular character. For Blake, losing that form in an indistinct mass of shading threatened the idea itself. ^[4]

This does not make his pictures exercises in contour with colour added afterwards. In the same catalogue he argued that the placing of light and dark, and consequently the success of colouring, depended on form. Look at the crouching body in Newton: the curve of the back, the forward thrust of the shoulders and the long reach towards the compasses make the concentration physically legible. The body’s outer shape establishes its relation to the rock and the narrow plane of the diagram. Colour gives weight and variety to a structure already held together by those decisive boundaries. ^{[1] [4]}

His letter to Thomas Butts of 22 November 1802 shows how seriously he considered the relationship. Blake reported two years of study devoted to light, shade and colour. He defended the pictures he had already painted for Butts, explaining that certain effects admired in other painters would be incompatible with his designs. The letter mixes gratitude with a fierce claim to artistic independence. It is valuable precisely because it presents colour as a problem Blake had thought through, rather than an accomplishment he had dismissed as unimportant. ^[18]

It also distinguishes the demands of portraiture from those of historical invention. Blake maintained that a portrait required the sitter’s presence in a way that an invented historical picture did not. We need not accept this as a rule for every artist to understand its bearing on his own work. A figure in a biblical or poetic scene has to embody a conception: grief, resistance, awe or the force of a vision. Its fidelity is measured against that imaginative task. The emphatic anatomy and compressed gestures of his pictures belong to this argument about what painting can show. ^[18]

Tempera on canvas, wood and iron

The physical supports of Blake’s temperas are remarkably varied. Moses Indignant at the Golden Calf, dated about 1799–1800, is painted on canvas. The Agony in the Garden, from approximately the same period, uses iron. The much later Satan Smiting Job with Sore Boils, about 1826, uses mahogany. These are specific objects with different surfaces and histories, and their materials resist any simple account of Blake as a painter who worked in one habitual format. ^{[2] [3] [19]}

The temperas also bring us close to the practical risks of his experiments. Tate’s catalogue reports that testing of Moses Indignant at the Golden Calf identified a vegetable gum medium. That is useful evidence for this painting, more precise than assuming that every work called tempera must use egg. The same catalogue connects the biblical temperas with Blake’s colour-printing experiments and notes the overlap in his use of the word fresco. The relationship rests in the handling of water-based paint and the artist’s conception of the finished work, as well as in shared subjects. ^[19]

In Moses, the commanding figure rises sharply above the broken tablets, while the dancers beside him turn and lift their arms. The contrast between his tense, angular action and their more flowing movements makes the drama readable even through the work’s altered surface. Tate’s catalogue draws on Janet Warner’s comparison of Moses’s pose with a description of indignation in John Weaver’s History of the Mimes and Pantomimes of 1728. It presents the resemblance as an example of a shared language of gesture available to history painters, without assuming that Blake read Weaver. The body speaks through forms that an audience could recognise. ^[19]

The iron of The Agony in the Garden is equally revealing. The support was once described as copper, but analysis identified iron, almost certainly with a tin coating. Beneath Blake’s white ground, investigators found an earlier red layer, suggesting that he reused a piece of metal from another purpose. The possibility gives a surprisingly tangible setting to the spiritual subject: the image was made on a manufactured thing with a material history of its own. ^[2]

Here the angel’s downward movement meets Christ’s upward reach. Their arms bind the two bodies together while the sleeping disciples remain below. The scene’s spiritual intensity emerges through bodily dependence and support. Its present darkness, however, cannot be treated as an exact record of Blake’s intended effect. Tate documents restoration in 1917 and 1949 and extensive missing original paint. The surviving image must be approached with attention to both its extraordinary invention and its damaged surface. ^[2]

Small biblical pictures with large ambitions

Thomas Butts’s patronage gave Blake sustained opportunities to develop biblical painting. Writing to George Cumberland on 26 August 1799, Blake reported that he was painting small pictures from the Bible and had an order for fifty at one guinea each. The letter conveys the significance of being paid for his own inventions during a difficult period for his engraving work. It is the artist’s account of an order, rather than a surviving checklist proving the completion and identity of fifty particular objects. ^[6]

Tate places Moses Indignant at the Golden Calf within the tempera group associated with this commission. Its catalogue records dated examples from 1799 and 1800. The group is important for understanding Blake’s paintings because it made sustained narrative invention possible at a relatively small scale. A scene could concentrate on a single decisive action: Moses breaking the law’s tablets, an angel strengthening Christ, or mourners responding to a death. Grandeur did not require the dimensions of a public mural. ^{[2] [19]}

Butts also owned watercolours such as The River of Life and The Entombment. The later works offer another kind of space for biblical invention. In The River of Life, dated about 1805, the river opens between trees and groups of people towards a radiant distance. Figures stand, move and stoop beside or within its flow. Tate identifies Revelation 22:1–2 as the source, while observing that Blake supplied the human figures himself. The picture expands the scriptural image through bodies and actions that allow a viewer to enter its world. ^{[5] [20]}

Such details help us see the Bible as a resource for imaginative composition. Naming the passage begins the reading; it does not finish it. The painter has to decide who appears, where a body turns, how the space opens and what action carries the emotional weight. In The River of Life, the viewer can first follow the stream and the figures, then return to the text with a clearer sense of what Blake has contributed. The pleasure lies in seeing an image think through a source. ^[5]

The letters preserve the working relationship behind these pictures. In November 1802 Blake asked Butts to choose a subject for a remaining canvas and reported that eighteen ordered drawings were still to be completed. The same letter contains the verse associated with his account of fourfold vision. Practical arrangements and imaginative life occupy the same document: an outstanding order, a choice of subject, a poem and a renewed promise of work. ^[21]

How a printed picture becomes a painted surface

The large colour prints bring the painter’s and printer’s activities into especially close contact. Their twelve designs, conceived in 1795, include Newton, Nebuchadnezzar, Pity and The Night of Enitharmon’s Joy, traditionally called Hecate. Twelve designs do not mean twelve surviving sheets. Several impressions of a composition can exist, and differences in printing and hand finishing make each object distinctive. In 2017, Viscomi recorded twenty-nine surviving impressions across those twelve designs. ^[17]

Viscomi’s technical discussion describes paint being transferred from a matrix, or printing surface, to dampened paper. In his reconstruction, most of the large designs were printed from prepared millboards, while God Judging Adam shows evidence of a low-relief metal plate. Blake’s large colour prints thus share a painterly character while carrying evidence of experiments across more than one kind of printing surface. ^{[16] [17]}

After printing came substantial work with watercolour and pen. Printed paint could produce a granular or spongy texture; translucent washes could enrich or alter it; drawn lines could define a limb, a face or a strand of hair. Viscomi stresses the interaction between the accidental effects of transfer and the decisions made afterwards. In this account, hand finishing is an inventive stage of making the image, capable of bringing an uncertain shape into sharper focus or changing the relationship of its colours. ^[16]

Tate’s description of The Night of Enitharmon’s Joy makes the sequence particularly easy to grasp. Dense printed colour establishes the rocks and sky. Pen work defines the figures and picks out hair, the bat and the donkey’s coat. Intense transparent washes give the bodies roundness, while the owl’s eyes receive an opaque red accent. The image combines broad, irregular texture with exquisitely particular marks. Its darkness is inhabited by minute acts of drawing. ^[22]

Blake’s emphatic outline and his attraction to unpredictable printed texture therefore belong together. The print could offer an irregular beginning that his hand developed into a distinct image. A close view can move between the two: first the patterned colour, then the precise turn of an eye or finger. That movement helps explain why these works can feel at once physically rough and sharply articulate. Tate’s material description of Enitharmon gives us an unusually clear way to recognise those layers of activity. ^{[16] [22]}

The exact mechanics of Blake’s colour printing have also been disputed. Michael Phillips proposed that inked text and coloured design in illuminated prints could be printed in separate passes. Robert N. Essick and Viscomi argued for printing them together in one pass, drawing on physical evidence and practical reconstruction. Their distinction between a print coloured afterwards and a print that receives colours from the plate remains especially useful. It allows us to describe what we are looking at while recognising that detailed accounts of Blake’s process have their own scholarly history. ^[23]

Blake’s own prospectus of 1793 had already placed the painter within his account of printing. He presented his invention as a way of combining the painter and poet, and advertised works in illuminated printing alongside historical engravings. He also emphasised the quality of the wove paper on which the illuminated books were printed. The announcement reveals an artist thinking about the complete object offered to a reader or buyer: its design, words, colour, paper and price. His claims for its economy and superiority were sales arguments, but the invitation to value the printed book as an original artistic production is unmistakable. ^[24]

Why one picture can have more than one date

Tate’s Newton carries an inscribed date of 1795, but the paper bears an 1804 watermark. The museum consequently distinguishes the early design from the later physical impression, cataloguing the work as 1795–about 1805. Its historical catalogue connects the sheet with an apparent delivery to Butts in September 1805. The inscription, watermark and documentary delivery describe different stages in the life of the picture. ^[1]

Blake could return to an existing design, print another impression and finish it for a buyer. An image conceived at one moment could receive its particular surface much later. Nebuchadnezzar provides another example of an inscribed 1795 date alongside an 1804 watermark in Tate’s collection. The dates remind us to ask which moment is being described: invention, printing, colouring or transfer to a patron. ^{[1] [25]}

Viscomi extends that question to signatures. In his 2017 study, he argues that Blake often signed works when they were sold, and that changes in the signatures of the large colour prints register a growing emphasis on their identity as paintings. His reading draws attention to the finished impression: an object that might be revisited and worked on as it moved from studio stock into someone’s collection. ^[17]

Blake’s 1818 letter to Dawson Turner offers a complementary piece of evidence. It advertises twelve large historical and poetical prints in colours, separately from the books, and invites an order. The letter confirms that Blake still presented these images as works available from his workshop. It does not establish when any particular surviving impression was printed. An offer for sale and the material history of a sheet answer related but different questions. ^[26]

The illuminated books provide a vivid parallel. The William Blake Archive’s editors describe how Blake assembled Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy E, for Butts in 1806 from impressions largely printed in 1789 and 1794. Earlier watercolour washes were supplemented by later colouring, while faintly printed words were strengthened or rewritten with a pen. The result was a book whose apparent coherence concealed several periods of making. Its readable surface depended on renewed work by hand. ^[27]

This example broadens the meaning of finishing. Hand colouring could supply atmosphere, but it could also rescue a weak impression and make its language legible. The editors’ account shows that the relationship between print and manuscript remained active long after a sheet first passed through the press. Catherine Blake’s participation also belongs in this material story: Essick and Viscomi describe William and Catherine washing sets of the early illuminated prints with watercolour before their assembly into books. The painterly surface emerged within the work of a household workshop. ^{[23] [27]}

The body makes the space

Blake’s figures can seem to push against the edges of their worlds. Newton folds inward, bringing a powerful body down to the narrow business of measurement. Nebuchadnezzar lowers a human body towards the ground, the king moving on all fours amid an enclosing environment. In The Agony in the Garden, the angel and Christ stretch between different levels of the composition. Across these contrasting subjects, bodily position gives abstract or spiritual conditions a physical shape. ^{[1] [2] [25]}

The effect depends on relationships within the image. A fully extended arm can pull attention across its width; a bowed back can close a figure into itself; wings can enlarge the space occupied by a body. In Satan Smiting Job with Sore Boils, the tormentor’s spreading limbs and wings dominate the panel above the reclining Job. Job’s wife bends close to the ground. Their unequal physical reach establishes the pressure of the encounter before the viewer identifies the episode or reads its scriptural source. ^[3]

These bodies are also reminders of Blake’s engagement with the art of earlier periods. Tate relates the figure in Newton to Michelangelo’s Abias in the Sistine Chapel, known to Blake through an engraving he copied. The particular pose thus has a history as well as a role in the finished composition. Blake’s imaginative invention could work through remembered and studied forms, transforming their setting and purpose. The muscular body carries its own visual inheritance into an unfamiliar world. ^[1]

It is often more rewarding to begin with such physical relations than with a fixed dictionary of symbols. Observe which body rises, which falls and which is confined; then ask what the subject and the text contribute. A figure can remain visually compelling before every identity has been settled. In Enitharmon, for example, Tate’s historical catalogue records serious disagreement over the traditional Hecate title. The clustered figures, animals and dark setting are available to the eye even as the history of naming complicates their interpretation. ^[22]

Following an invention across different forms

The late painting of Satan Smiting Job with Sore Boils offers an especially useful comparison. Tate’s catalogue traces the subject through the Butts and Linnell watercolour sets, preparatory work for the engravings, the sixth engraved illustration and the tempera on mahogany. In the final painted treatment Satan gains wings, and the clouds around the sun become more schematic. The composition grows more monumental even though the panel remains modest in size. ^[3]

The engraving offers something the panel does not reproduce: a border with biblical words and additional imagery. Published with the Job suite in 1826, it asks to be read through the interaction of the central scene and its margins. The tempera reorganises attention around the confronting bodies and the expansive winged figure. Neither object supplies a neutral substitute for the other. Comparing them reveals Blake deciding afresh what a picture in a different form can do. ^{[3] [28]}

His late illustrations to Dante provide another approach to the painter at work. In Dante and Virgil Penetrating the Forest, from the 1824–27 project, pencil, pen and watercolour remain visibly distinct. Tate describes the sheet as unfinished, noting light blue and green washes in the brighter areas and carbon black in the threatening wood. The figures move through a forest in which some forms are strongly stated while others remain lightly indicated. The eye can follow an invention emerging without needing to imagine every unpainted area filled. ^[29]

In the Dante watercolour, the passage from a fine drawn contour to a broad wash remains open to inspection. The paper participates in the image, giving breathing space around the trees and figures. An unfinished work can make the relationship between drawing and colour particularly evident, but the material description also prevents us from treating its relative lightness as the deliberate final appearance of every Blake watercolour. ^[29]

For readers beginning to explore, these comparisons create a useful route through the Job illustrations and the Dante designs. Follow one subject through its versions before moving to another. Notice what becomes clearer, what disappears, and whether an added margin changes the way the main image reads. Blake’s repetitions become occasions for renewed decisions about scale, gesture, colour and the place of words. ^{[3] [28] [29]}

An exhibition imagined on a national scale

The smallness of many surviving objects can obscure Blake’s ambitions for painting. His 1809 exhibition brought together sixteen works, including pictures he called frescoes and works he called drawings. The catalogue advertised their sale, but it also imagined an audience and a setting beyond the private collector’s room. Blake proposed that some biblical drawings might become enlarged paintings for church altars, and he envisaged monumental versions of his spiritual forms of Nelson and Pitt. ^[4]

The paintings’ public purpose was inseparable from his technical claims. He praised clear colour and definite form, attacked the effects he associated with oil painting and announced the recovery of an ancient practice. These assertions tell us how Blake wanted his art to be understood. They should be read as his polemical theory, with its extravagant claims about earlier artists and the history of painting, rather than accepted as a modern technical account. His promise of permanence is especially poignant beside the altered surfaces that survive. ^{[2] [4] [30]}

The catalogue also reveals experiment and dissatisfaction. Blake described several pictures as experimental and acknowledged the damage that repeated work could do to their forms. His account of Satan Calling Up His Legions says that labour had obscured the lineaments and that recovering an earlier effect had been difficult. The painter who proclaimed certainty about outline could also describe the practical experience of losing it. This gives his defence of clear form the urgency of a working artist’s struggle. ^[4]

The exhibition’s sale conditions kept the painting of The Canterbury Pilgrims in Blake’s hands for twelve months so that he could engrave it. Even in this public assertion of his identity as a painter, the picture’s next life as a print remained part of the plan. Painting and printmaking met through the ordinary business of retaining a work long enough to prepare its reproduction. Blake’s ambitions for public art and his workshop arrangements occupy the same pages. ^[4]

Looking at the paintings as they survive

An attentive encounter with Blake includes the history of what has happened to the surface. Tate’s The Bard, from Gray has changed substantially. The museum records a thin white preparation of chalk and glue, later affected by glue introduced during lining. That treatment altered the effect of transparent colour over the light ground and disturbed details in shell gold. Some red areas survived more successfully than the blues. The painting’s present balance therefore carries the consequences of treatment and ageing as well as Blake’s decisions. ^[30]

The River of Life has a different history of alteration. Colour protected by an old mount provides evidence of fading across the exposed part of the watercolour. Tate also identifies later blue additions intended to compensate for that change. Its delicate, pale appearance cannot simply be praised as though every tone were preserved exactly as Blake placed it. The ruled border, meanwhile, offers rare evidence of how he presented a watercolour. Looking at the edge can be as informative as looking at the centre. ^[5]

This awareness enriches the experience without requiring a viewer to become a conservator. Begin with the support and medium. Follow the line around a body. Look for the difference between translucent wash, opaque colour and drawn detail. Consider whether the image belongs to a sequence or has related versions. Finally, allow the condition of the object to qualify conclusions about its original darkness, brilliance or finish. Blake’s pictures reward all these scales of attention, from the reach of an entire figure to the surviving colour beneath a mount. ^{[2] [3] [5] [22]}